Sean Rife, PhD Biography

Title:

Assistant Professor of Psychology at Murray State University

Position:

Con
to the question
"Do Violent Video Games Contribute to Youth Violence?"

Reasoning:

“Advocates of a video game-aggression link point to meta-analyses as the strongest evidence for their view… But meta-analysis itself has come under scrutiny as of late…first, if you do an analysis of hundreds of poorly-designed studies, all you have is artfully-analyzed noise… Second, meta-analysis suffers from a phenomenon known as publication bias: because scientific papers that fail to find an anticipated result are almost never published…

Setting all that aside, there is an additional, excellent reason to reject the video game-aggression hypothesis: over the last 30 years, video game sales have skyrocketed, and the games themselves have become both (a) more realistic, and (b) more violent… And yet, over the same period… violent crime has decreased substantially… If one were to ignore warnings against inferring correlation from causation, one might be tempted to conclude that violent video games actually reduce aggression.”

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